Jamie Reidy shares a story concerning his own baptism into the wonderful world of wash.
This CNNi report shares the good-natured label in these men’s pants made by Madhouse. In case you can’t see all the words, it reads “Give it to your woman: it’s her job.”
The chino’s owner’s girlfriend, British journalist Emma Barnett, broke the story.
Obviously, a guy designed that label. And I know why. He simply got tired of the joke in his pants, so he added one to everyone’s. Ba-dum-dum!
When I was younger I had the same attitude as that joker.
Now, I do my own laundry. And I vividly recall the moment that habit started 23-years ago.
In May of 1989, I returned from my freshman year at Notre Dame with a present for my mother: two enormous duffle bags crammed with dirty clothes. (Note: ND once provided a laundry service for its students, so I never had to learn how to wash my own clothes. At the end of the semester, I’d simply been too lazy to schlep my laundry across campus. Hence, the two duffles full. Nice son, right?)
Mom joked that she’d being doing wash for weeks. While fulfilling her prophecy, she took a full basket of wet laundry outside to dry on the line. En route, stubbed her pinky toe against a concrete step and broke it (the toe, not the step).
In and of itself, this wasn’t a medical disaster. But the injury did force my father, an infamous sleep-kicker, to spend the night on the couch. And the next night. All totaled, he spent sixty nights in Sofa City.
Yes, by mid-August, Mom’s toe still had not healed.
As I prepared to head back to Notre Dame for my sophomore year, triple digit temperatures and high humidity melted the New York area. This hit The Reidy’s particularly hard, since we were the only family on the block without central air conditioning. (Last family to get cable TV, last to get Nintendo…)
To beat the heat, the five of us spent all our time in the basement, excuse me, “the downstairs,” where the temperature remained 20-degrees cooler than upstairs.
During my last weekend at home, my mother began doing the laundry I’d accumulated throughout the summer. Saturday afternoon my brother Patrick (11), sister Anne-Marie (9) and I stared blankly at the TV as Dad aimlessly flipped channels while Mom folded the first load of my clean clothes.
He paused on the New York Mets baseball game long enough for us to hear the play-by-play announcer mention, “Daryl Strawberry is back in the lineup, seven-days after breaking his big toe.”
I bolted upright, unable to contain the joke that sprouted in my brain. With a huge grin, I winked at my father.
“Hey, Mom!” She stopped folding and turned to me with a marked lack of interest. “Daryl Strawberry broke his big toe last week, and he’s already back on the field. You broke your pinky toe in May, and Dad’s still on the couch!” I cracked myself up.
Rich Reidy didn’t laugh. Didn’t even smirk. He took in a quick breath, which he held, and then fearfully glanced at his wife.
Her glare could have frozen lava. She took a lengthy drag on her cigarette.
“Well, James, maybe you should ask Daryl Strawberry to finish doing your wash.”
Without another word, Loretta Reidy threw down the shirt she had been folding, picked up one of the three trashy romance novels she has open at any given time and began reading.
With at least six loads of wash remaining, I was hung out to dry laundry-wise.
Later that night, I found my father alone in the kitchen. “Dad, my Darryl Strawberry line was hilarious! Why didn’t you laugh?”
He did that thing where he looks around to make sure the close is clear.
“Sure, Jamie, it was funny.” My old man leaned close to me, like a junkie desperate for a fix. “But, I couldn’t laugh.”
Off my confusion, he explained, “Listen, I’m just trying to get back in The Big Bed.”
Now, that’s a smart man whose laundry always gets done.
That italicized essay will appear in Jamie Reidy’s upcoming book, “A Walk’s As Good As A Hit: Advice/Threats from My Old Man.” Look for it on Amazon.com in mid-April.
Isn’t it interesting, though, that the tag on the pants assumes that a MAN will be the one reading the care instructions. That tag only makes sense if men really are attempting to wash their own clothes….
I suspect that this is a clever ploy to bring national attention to a brand of pants that are otherwise indistinguishable from the other 1000 brands of khakis. And guess what, it clearly works!
Once again, I wonder if this whole “men don’t do laundry” is actually something that doesn’t exist. It is only an urban myth. A few years ago my wife and I were part of mail survey about time use. We each filled out our surveys and were ready to send them in. My wife did note something that frankly I never noticed. The task list for the household did not include yard work, car repairs, home repairs, jobs that I normally do. This meant that my time use calcs were going to be way off. At the end of the… Read more »
Yet, the “data” from these “studies” has been/is used to slap men with being lazy sloths who come home and sit on the couch watcing TV while the Mrs. works her fingers to the bone cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and scrubbing the toilet. Aside from most of the cleaning and some of the shopping, I do all of the exterior work on my nearly one acre partially wooded, extensively landscaped yard. The Mrs. is inside usually relaxing while I’m outside sweating and swatting gnats. I don’t begrudge her that oR&R ne iota, and she appreciates everything I do – although… Read more »
Fixing a type in my last sentence.
I don’t begrudge her that R&R one iota, and she appreciates everything I do – although the people who claim that men don’t do enough around the house (as you point out) don’t even consider it valuable enough to count as work.
They explained that the items I had mentioned were not done each and every week and would therefore be so low as to not matter. I explained that in fact , yard work, car repairs etc actually took up about 3 hours of my time each week. And that is the exact argument I’ve seen from people who are so hung up on how women do sooooo much more work at home than in the work week. Yeah just blatantly dismiss work that is done mostly be men and then declare that men aren’t doing as much work. Funny thing… Read more »
I also wonder how much housework that women do is actually necessary and how much is “elective,” for lack of a better word. Vacuuming three times a week seems unnecessary to me, so I don’t think I should get dinged for ‘laziness’ if only do it once a week. If there is a gender difference, part of the difference may be in terms of standards — having unrealistic, inhuman standards doesn’t make one harder working, it makes one unbalanced.
I’m always amused when a group of blokes sit around agreeing that surely they do as much work on household chores as the women, and anyway all this stuff the women insist on isn’t really important. You know, much the same way teenagers will explain away all the silly demands their parents are making.
Anyone that insists on vacuuming 3 times a week should be doing it at least 2x themselves. Once a week is reasonable. This is the kind of thing people should talk about prior to cohabitating. If there are differences in standards, it is as much the woman’s fault as the man’s. She’s an adult too and should have known to discuss such things before cohabitating.
The implication that men are the children and women are the adults in relationships is unreasoning.
My wife and I split the laundry, now that we’re retired. Before that, I did about 95% of it. And I never knew it was a big deal.
Boy, talk about being out of the loop.
Hell, doing no-brainer stuff with half your brain asleep and the other half thinking about whatever and get CREDIT for it? You mean guys passed up the opportunity? Must have been the lead-paint-chewers didn’t get the message.
I haven’t don laundry consistenly for years. I do most of the cleaning, a good bit of the grocery shopping, all of the exterior work (and there’s a lot) and I work full time. But, I hate laundry. With a passion.
Happily, though, for reasons which make no sense to me, Mrs. Eric M. loves doing laundry. So, agreed before we got married we agreed as to who would do what, and she signed up for laundry duty. Thank goodness.
Lars, I think, if anything, we’re just making fun of the way it used to be, i.e. men didn’t do their own laundry.
This is another of these GMP posts that has me confused – much like Tom’s recent one about cooking. Why is it special for a man to do laundry? It’s one of these things that need doing. Take turns, pick the one who find it relaxing, whatever. All it takes to drop the gender from the equation is to decide it doesn’t matter.
People ought to do their own laundry for God’s sake. And pay their own rent. And buy their own gaudy engagement rings to show off.
No, Julie, you’re right: my dad’s banishment was strictly toe-related. I was just joshing a bit with my quote.
Took me a sec to figure out what you did there. Funny, we don’t hear many stories about husbands’ booting their wives from bed, do we?
Does anyone actually get booted out of bed anymore? I always figured the pissed off one wouldn’t want to be in the bed. And wasn’t Jamie’s dad to the couch not cause she was pissed but because he kicked at her and it hurt her toe? Or are we to assume the toe’s slow healing had to do with her not wanting him in the bed? Confused.
The fact that he avoided laughing at his son’s joke was because he didn’t want to be booted out of bed due to his wife’s anger.
Too bad though. It’s a funny joke.
I probably would have laughed at it, if it were directed at me. But then if the OP were my kid I probably would have taught him the life skill known as ‘doing laundry.’
Hmm… regendering: During my last weekend at home, my father began cleaning the gutters that had accumulated throughout the summer[due to breaking his toe]. Saturday afternoon my brother Patrick (11), sister Anne-Marie (9) and I stared blankly at the TV as Mom aimlessly flipped channels while Dad came in from his duties. She paused on the New York Mets baseball game long enough for us to hear the play-by-play announcer mention, “Daryl Strawberry is back in the lineup, seven-days after breaking his big toe.” I bolted upright, unable to contain the joke that sprouted in my brain. With a huge… Read more »